Monday, May 5, 2014

I just came back from an amazing month-long vacation in Egypt. One idea I had before going there was that I wanted to go visit mosques regularly by going into a nearby mosque when the call to prayer rang across the city to pray, going to Friday prayer, doing wudu and wearing hijab at least occaisionally. Basically try to live more of an Islamic lifestyle, a lifestyle centred around Islamic obligations. This is something that is easily possible in Egypt with mosques everywhere and the call to prayer reminding us 5x a day... and being on vacation, I had few obligations preventing me from doing it.

However, it didn't really work out that way. I guess that's to be expected, nothing really works out exactly as planned... Concrete plans are not a good thing in Egypt!

Still, I do find that I had more God-consciousness going on than I had before. I went to Friday prayer 2 out of 3 times and prayed a few regular prayers here and there. One thing that I didn't expect would make a difference was making wudu more regularly. It really is an act of worship to prepare yourself for God. Sometimes I didn't pray or anything like that, but just doing this for God made me more conscious of his presence and importance throughout the time that I was in a state of wudu.

Although I didn't have a life-changing spiritual experience, I had one that is right for me. Gradual and private.